Moving the Needle, Vol. 01

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Today, I bring you my first, semi-weekly anchor post, Moving the Needle. It will serve as an in-blog newsletter of sorts to share what I’ve been working on and what’s been inspiring me.

This week

My needle has been moving in and out of mockups while I worked through a belated adjustment to my original trouser block. Drafting only to the knee saved fabric and time and helped me focus on solving a crotch length mystery that only showed up while walking. I love all of the anatomy lessons I’m getting from pattern drafting. Speaking of anatomy, I used the only scale in my house (the balance board of my Nintendo Wii) to confirm I’d lost 8 lbs since January. Now I know why I had to remove an extra 4cm from my skirt block in May! The discovery has me re-thinking some of the garments I’ve been planning. Elastic waists, wrap closures, and alteration-friendly seaming might be the best way to cloth my changing body.

Sew Inspired

The t-shirt dresses Carolyn made to keep cool this summer have given me ideas for adding breezy-ease to a lengthened version of my fitted t-shirt pattern. The drape and floral print of the gorgeous charmeuse dress on the Clothing Engineer blog put silk back on my fabric shopping list. A mix of vintage and modern methods (and an eye-catching African cotton print) went into this 13-step tutorial for sewing a button fly on trousers. Krista of Man Repeller’s series on styling for fuller bosoms woke me up to the layered, ruffled skirt as a real option for me; and this simple how-to stopped me from overthinking how to sew one.  Star Trek the Next Generation meets the 1940s in the best group costuming project my Halloween sewing plans have ever seen.

Quotes to Sew By

Success consists of going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. ~ Winston Churchill.

Playing dress-up begins at age five and never truly ends. ~Kate Spade

P.S.

After watching this movie on Netflix about how our bodies handle over-consumption of sugar, I stopped drinking soda. My healthier, shrinking body is the excuse I didn’t need to sew more clothes.

Bound for the Sun

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With a fool-proof strategy for binding the neckline and armholes of a sleeveless knit top, my relationship with the summer heat finally caught a cool breeze.

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I found myself unprepared for the nuclear levels of heat that are happening. My selection of warm weather tops is grossly inadequate for the global baking of the earth. Any project that does not directly involve the prevention of melting has been put on hold.

Tank tops have topped my priorities.

The mission: Make my favorite t-shirt pattern sleeveless and perfect my knit wrap-around binding construction.

Fresh out of “the lab”, this stretch jersey tank is my mostly successful but still very wearable mockup to test my pattern adjustments and the execution of the knit binding technique I adapted from Marcy Tilton’s book. It produces a smooth edge that hugs the neckline.

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Before I binge-sew a hundred more (yeah-yeah, I know…it will be more like, three), I wrote a little construction guide to help me repeat (and improve) my binding results on the next tops – which might have different neckline depths or shapes. For those of you with wardrobes as vulnerable to heatwaves as mine, this could come in handy.

Formula for Calculating Knit Binding Length

  1. Measure. Measure seam allowance-free neckline and armholes, front and back. Record totals. Divide neckline circumference by 4 to get the length of the test strip for finding the fabric’s optimal neck-to-binding ratio.
  2. Stretch. Cut a 5 cm (2-inch) wide by test strip length piece on the crossgrain. Stretch it along measuring tape in a 1 to 1 ratio to see how far it can stretch before the fabric gets distorted.
  3. Calculate. Multiply the stretch distance (e.g., 1cm) by 4, subtract it from the neckline circumference, and add the total seam allowance for the binding’s join to get the final length of neckline binding. Repeat the calculation with the armhole circumference for its binding length.
  4. Miter. Cut binding lengths by preferred width —3 times finished width plus 1.3 cm (1/2 inch) for turn of cloth and underlap — and cut short ends on a 45 degree angle. Sew the ends with a 1cm seam, press seam open, then trim allowance to reduce bulk.
  5. Quarter. With seamed and finished shoulder seams, divide the neckline and binding into quarters (without using the binding’s seam as a marker), and snip tiny notches. Keep the binding’s seam off-center at the back, match and pin it to the neckline at the snipped markers, right sides together with binding on top so feed dogs can ease in the longer neckline to the smaller binding.
  6. Sew. Set machine to a slight zig zag stitch, stretch the binding strip slightly while sewing between each pin.
  7. Wrap. Wrap it to the wrong side, smoothing the binding over an even seam allowance. Press over a ham from the front side, pinning along the way. Turn underlap edge under, overlock it, leave it as-is, or pink it (my favorite option so far).
  8. Secure. Sew the binding in place by stitching in the ditch from the front side with an edgestitch foot (or by hand for extra invisibility).
  9. Repeat. Carry out steps 5 through 8 for the left and right armhole bindings.

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The status of this mockup as a wearable muslin was sealed when I forgot to check the placement of the binding’s joining seam. Ideally, one would place it inconspicuously. For the neckline: in the back, off-center. For the armhole: in line with the side seam. On my right armhole, it landed aimlessly near the shoulder seam.

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If you walk around from that point to the front and squint your eyes, you can see the neckline binding’s mitered seam loitering about near the top of the shoulder.

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Hardly noticeable unless you find yourself close enough to my neck to kiss or bite it. My potential critics are: my husband or Dracula. Luckily, neither will care given their business in that area.

I rewarded my triple binding work with a simple, lazy zig-zagged hem.

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If it’s possible to have a crush on a sewing technique, I certainly have one on this wrap-around binding. It elevates the status of a tank top to more than just a color peeking out from under a cardigan….it becomes a hand-wrapped license to bare arms.

Are you sewing yourself cool this summer? How do you finish the holes of your sleeveless garments? Do you turn, bind, or band?

May the Pants be with you

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When you make a personal pledge in a public forum to draft, design, and sew a pair of trousers in a month’s time and actually accomplish it, the sun shines a little brighter and your short legs look a little longer.

Najah Carroll's Self-Drafted Linen Trousers (front view)

A few days after writing about my custom denim pencil skirt, I found out that Brooks Ann Camper, my favorite long distance sewing teacher, had developed a pants drafting system with NO standard sizes or pre-defined measurements (unlike the ones in my pattern drafting textbooks filled with “lower by 1/4-inch “or “check the size chart” kind of guidance). The drafting method uses the skirt block I crafted in her original class and a new set of body measurements for bifurcation. She invited her Skirt Skills students to participate in the first run of her Smarty Pants e-Course and I jumped in with both feet.

In fact, the course is still going on now! We’re in the last week of things, learning the finishing steps for TWO pair of custom pants drafted from blocks: trousers and yes….jeans. Since the course can be both self-paced and real-time, I chose to make my trousers in pace with the 6-week lessons and will start on my jeans block and fitting afterward.

So, this story about making linen trousers from the ground up will be told with a little less word count and more hyperlinks than usual. Besides, you may already know the story if you’ve been following my “Me Made May” 31-day micro-blogging marathon on Instagram under the hashtag #wannabesewingpants.

#wannabesewing pants on Instagram

Every First Draft is Perfect

Drafting my way to a garment pattern has been surprisingly less stressful than dealing with the ambiguity of opening the envelope of a purchased pattern or assembling a downloadable one.

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In custom sewing class, we’re reminded of the inherent perfection of the first drafting work that happens with a block pattern. It’s job in pantsmaking is to represent a map of my lower body and legs. Once drafted into existence, it is a perfect resource of information for whatever pants style I want to design.

Knowing that my final garment will be based directly on information from MY BODY (not some “ideal” body I must compare mine to) is like getting a hug and a dozen roses from your best friend before going on stage. It’s the best kind of self-administered sewing support.

To understand how well my two-dimensional waist-to-ankle map corresponded to my three-dimensional body, I spent some time evaluating a muslin mockup up of my wide legged trouser block. The process put me in the role of Sewing Detective as I considered how to give a bit more room for my body at the crotch area. I sketched out a theory on my croquis so I could understand the impact the pattern correction would have on the fit of my trouser block, and spent a few days getting lost on the way to executing it. Ultimately I re-learned the value of slowing down during construction.

Design in the Trenches

I only had a rough idea of what kind of pants I’d make when I declared my intentions to all of the #Sewcialists. I wanted to see what specific inspiration would strike once my block was ready, so I pinned all the pins in a sartorial tribute to Katherine Hepburn’s iconic trousers-wearing and raided my fabric collection for options suitable for the wide-leg style I had in mind. The timeframe I had to work in, the warm season, my patience, and skill level (yep, still hovering somewhere on the spectrum between advanced beginner and intermediate seamstress) were also a part of the Committee for Real Life Sewing that influenced my design process.

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By day 20, I’d worked out a sketch of a simple design for a pair of linen trousers with familiar construction features to prevent first-timer fumbles (thinking back to the topstitching drama of my denim pencil skirt) that could trigger my inner Samuel L. Jackson and jeopardize my momentum:

  1. A straight/wide leg, drafted 3cm narrower then my trouser block pattern that sits at my natural waist
  2. A hip-length waistline facing for tummy control
  3. An invisible side zipper
  4. 3 patch pockets – 1 in front, 2 in back

I really enjoyed the pattern work that solidified my original sketch and was glad I didn’t design more features than I could handle. With jeans as my next mission, there would be plenty of patterning, construction work, and even more topstitching (Bring it on!) to feed my appetite for design play.

11th-Hour Finish

I highly recommend timing your major construction work over a three-day holiday weekend. I may have missed out on all the Memorial Day happenings around town, but I did take a break from sewing for a highly-anticipated face to face meetup with Brooks Ann where she answered my final construction question (hell yes to twill tape along the waistline stay stitching) and let me get all “fan girl” for a while and go on about sewing for way longer than my husband can tolerate at home.

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With the power of The Force still with me, I returned to my project and followed the custom sewing techniques I learned in class to semi-baste together my flax linen trousers (shout out to the lovely, UK fabric store that sent me 3 meters of Robert Kaufmann Essex Wide Flax cotton/linen in the hopes I’d make something fabulous with it one day that might reach my UK readers looking to support an independent business trying to branch out into garment-weight fabrics), try them on, adjust the fit and pass on the changes to my final garment pattern.

For this pattern in the heavy-bodied, almost bottom weight linen-cotton blend fabric I’d chosen, I took in the side seams by 4 cm, tapering from the waist to the thigh. I’m curious how a linen with more drape would respond to the design. When I’m done with the course, I may follow my curiosity to another pair of linen trousers.

When I returned to work after the holiday break, the big analytics project I’d kicked off earlier in the month had picked up steam and time-sucked me into a thousand meetings that made me get that hallway-stretching horror movie feeling that I was never gonna get out of here and back to my sewing room. I ultimately escaped. It was day 31 and I had only hours until midnight to finish my trousers in time to meet my self-imposed deadline.

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With only a handful of “monkey-fighting” moments —I do admit to banning my family from my presence long enough to install, remove, and re-install (with the right foot this time) an invisible zipper without interruption — I finished my trousers around midnight and proceeded to sleep like a baby. When Baby woke up the next day, she wore the cutest trousers and the biggest smile to the office.

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Thank you, to the #Sewcialists of Instagram who followed and encouraged me with likes and you-can-do-its along the way. Sharing my goal with such a big audience helped me see it through to the end. A month-long, public marathon of making was pretty intense, so I’ll probably keep my attempts to once a year.

With this latest dive into custom sewing, however, I learned so much (besides the ass-kicking skill of self-drafting pants) from the experience…like how to get the most of the small chunks of time available to me, how to create a garment plan to guide my approach, and how to trust my fitting and design instincts to make me enormously proud of what I can produce with my mind and hands.